


Foreseer

by redlittleowl



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Gen, Immortality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-11
Updated: 2015-12-11
Packaged: 2018-05-06 03:04:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5400662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redlittleowl/pseuds/redlittleowl





	Foreseer

It’s raining again, and there’s no one at the remains of your home to remind you to cover up. You stand under the trees and feel the droplets course their way down your face, through your hair, soaking your clothes and skin like you’re not wearing anything. It’s an odd feeling, the sensation of being above ground, of breathing fresh air, of some kind of tenuous freedom that you don’t really have—something you don’t really want to leave behind, even as the feeling of responsibility tries to draw you back underground, back to where you know the survivors are struggling to hold together, with or without you, and you wonder _why_.

The apocalypse has come and gone, and the sickness with it, and the only thing holding you here is the fact that the scientists had made you immortal, so that you could, as their manifesto had put it, “guide humanity back to the glory we held before the Reckoning and the ash sickness decimated our species”. It’s quite a bit of a fact, really, the fact that age can’t touch you, that sickness has no hold over you; your only comfort is that you do need to sleep for long periods of time—years, decades, a couple of generations if you stay awake more than twenty years or so. It’s a reassurance, if a small one, and it helps hold most of your weariness at bay, most of the time. But sometimes someone will thank you for your help in such a way—a “thank you, Foreseer,” with a look of such gratitude that you feel you don’t deserve—that the weariness and the sheer _exhaustion_ seeps into your bones and you have to struggle to hold off the Sleep.

You stare up at the trees above you, and a wave of sadness washes over you, a yearning for when you had friends and family and people who cared about you, people who weren’t afraid of you, and even though you know you shouldn’t, you resent these cowering, respectful survivors, these followers of yours that revere you as some kind of God-figure that will lead them to salvation. You know you can’t—you can only guide them, and counsel them in what they should do and in some of what is to come. The position of leadership was never meant for you, and you are grateful for that, but it is something that has never occurred to them, even when the Sleep washes over you and ensures that all the familiar faces you’ve come to know will be decades dead and buried the next time you wake. It’s a festering thorn in your heart that will never heal, and you hate yourself and them for it, even as you turn to the cavern entrance to descend back below ground.

You leave the rain behind, but the soothing lullaby it sings after you echoes in your head for centuries.


End file.
